


Finally

by humansandotherpeople



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Injuries, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Battle of Scarif, spiritassassin 2017 exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 20:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10316492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humansandotherpeople/pseuds/humansandotherpeople
Summary: No time like the convalescence period after nearly dying in battle to finally figure out some interpersonal relationship stuff that has been simmering for a long, long time.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ravens_rising](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravens_rising/gifts).



> For the prompt "baze and chirrut don't get together until late in life- maybe after baze comes back from his time off planet, or even post rogue one movie, if you can swing an idea for that".

Chirrut hadn't known anybody on the base for long, with one notable exception, and had been, to be perfectly honest, worried he wouldn't recognise the people he had fought with if they passed him in a medbay full of too many sounds from too many directions to identify, and miss them. He shouldn't have been. When one of them approached, he was unmistakable.

Too shallow breathing, the shakiness of which reflected the quick, irregular heartbeat that must no doubt seem thunderous to its owner. Footsteps that tried even now, as the Jedhan boy limped through the medbay getting accustomed to the new prosthesis (that's presumably what it was, it sounded different than his foot used to), to make as little noise as possible and disturb nobody and that fell completely silent as he spotted Chirrut and hesitated. The rustle of his nervous fingers fiddling with and tugging on his medbay gown.

“Bodhi,” Chirrut called out.

The young pilot managed the last few steps until he stood in front of him, clearly unsure what to do with himself for a moment. He looked around. Then he sat on the floor, angling the prosthetic leg underneath himself awkwardly, so they were eye to useless eye. “Yes?” he said.

“Can you tell me who is in that vat?” Chirrut rapped his knuckles against the bacta tank he was leaning against. The tap echoed through the gel and the body floating in it. The sound joined the monotone patient statistics from the tank monitor that some helpful medical droid had set to vocal output in not quite being able to tell him what he wanted to know.

It took Bodhi a moment to answer, maybe to take a good enough look to be certain, maybe to figure out why he was being asked. “It's your… Baze. Baze Malbus.”

“Oh, good.” Chirrut smiled, wide, showing teeth. His hand came to rest flat against the vat, separated from Baze's shin by a few inches of transpariplast and bacta. “I would have looked even more the fool for holding a vigil for a teenage Wookiee I have never met.”

“You don't look foolish,” Bodhi said quietly.

Chirrut didn't point out that he _felt_ foolish. Instead he commenced indulging in foolishness. “How does _he_ look?”

Bodhi gulped. “Burns all over. Still. But they were worse, they're healing, and no open-”

Chirrut placed a steadying hand on Bodhi's arm. The other remained pressed against the transpariplast. “The medical droids already told me about that. I mean his expression.”

“I don't know… I don't, I don't know him that well, and, he's not conscious? Obviously.” He took another moment to actually look at Baze. “Serene, I think. Maybe a bit worried.”

Chirrut's hands fell into his lap. He deflated. But while knowing that even a hint of the worry Baze experienced in their last waking moments together had accompanied him into his unconscious state made him feel the scarred-over recent blaster damage to his torso as if it had left him hollowed out, it could not make him forget his manners. “Thank you, young Rook,” he said, “and not just for looking through transparent materials for me and describing the faces my old friend makes. He would not be here to heal and I would not be here to fail watching over him if it weren't for you.”

“I didn't actually -” Bodhi began.

“Jyn and Cassian may have dragged us into the shuttle. But why was the shuttle there? Why were they on it? Your bravery. Your persistence.” Chirrut's remarks were more likely to bring him back to his moment of pain, stir the guilt survivors felt, than to make him feel appreciated, he knew. And yet he felt compelled to keep at it until at least some part of the sentiment made it through to Bodhi. It seemed very important now to make the young pilot feel his honest gratitude. Baze could be like this, too wrapped up in his dark feelings to hear his praise.

“Cassian on his broken leg...” Bodhi muttered.

“There are more hindering states for legs to be in than broken. The pilot's seat was the best place for you then.” Chirrut said gently, but pointedly. Cassian had, while he had done some medically inadvisable things on his wounded leg, not needed a complete replacement for it. After a moment's hesitation Chirrut added: “I am thankful that the Force put you there.”

Bodhi did not protest this time. Quite unlike Baze, he was more willing to accept the achievements of the Force than his own. He answered with a silence that was indicative of earnest considerations, adjacent to the silences of meditation and communion with deities or the Force. Chirrut fell into silent prayer himself until he felt Bodhi was weighing words on his tongue.

“Yes?” Chirrut encouraged him.

“Before. Can you… Do you remember what happened on Scarif? Before they got you on the ship.” Chirrut didn't quite know what Bodhi was asking for, and when he didn't respond immediately, Bodhi scrambled to explain: “I'm asking everyone. Everyone I got out, anyway. So I can fill in my memories.”

“You want to be reminded?” Chirrut asked, inclining his head.

“It's something that really happened. I want my mind to understand it like that. Not like… scraps of nightmares.” There was a hoarse intensity and urgency to Bodhi's tone that threatened to crack Chirrut's heart.

He wasn't a particularly good storyteller, caring for the abstract too much to either describe the entirety of an event or mention only what actually happened. But Bodhi was a good listener, almost as good as Baze with his decades of practice understanding him, and so he managed to relay an image of what the attack on the beach had looked – or at least sounded, smelled and felt – like from the ground. Up until the moment that perhaps interested Bodhi the most for his purposes of bringing events into their correct order: When he had flipped the master switch to allow the pilot to get out his message, and been shot.

“From then on it is a bit like scraps of dreams for me, too. But I have meditated on it,” he admitted somewhat apologetically.

“At least we're on the same transport, then,” said Bodhi with an embarrassed little smile in his voice.

Chirrut creased his brows trying to remember accurately, his head leaned back against the bacta tank. “Suddenly, he was over me, in the line of fire, although I had left him behind cover. He was praying for me. No, first I tried to look at him, like this -” He let his hand hover inches from Bodhi's face for a moment. “And he took my hand. He held on to me. He would not permit me to leave. I tried very hard to stay, you see. But just in case, I told him something, a comfort. Perhaps that was what made him pray.”

“What did you say?”

“That he could find me in the Force. I meant even when I am dead, but maybe he tried to find me a last time before I was gone. But I am certain he prayed because I could not.

“Baze Malbus, whom I barely even remember feeling anything but disdain for the Force, whose lips no holy word has been allowed to touch for two decades, making sure a religious old man had a prayer as he passed. And he would have prayed until my last breath, maybe longer, if he hadn't shielded me from that grenade first.” And then, before he could stop himself, he had asked the question that had gnawed at him ever since the moments he was describing, that had distracted him from meditation, that made him feel like a fool, in the tone he would use to pose hypothetical philosophical conundrums to new initiates at the Temple of the Whills or curious pilgrims in the streets of NiJedha: “Would you consider such a thing an act of love, Bodhi?”

A startled laugh, sputtering. “What? Yes. I mean. Yes. Of course. I… guess?”

Chirrut suddenly found it hard to speak. There was a lump in his throat and another question to be asked, but he wasn't quite sure which or how. “… of course?”

“Yeah, I… Are you asking me whether Baze loves you? Because I thought… I mean, I assumed you were married.” Uncomfortable shifting. “But then, Jyn said she thought you might be brothers.”

Chirrut, who had been blinking back tears a moment before, snorted at that. “Well, we are all siblings in the Force.” His heart hammered like a battle-drum for the armies of the hope he was about to express out loud in their battle against the forces of the fear that this hope might be unfounded. “But I think there is nevertheless more truth to your assumption than to Jyn's. I have always found him… attractive, you see, first from afar, then, after the fall of the temple, we became constant companions and he started meaning everything to me. And maybe, maybe...”

His fingertips ran over the wall of the bacta tank futilely.

“Chirrut?”

“Yes.” He let go of the transpariplast of the vat and dropped his hands into his lap.

“Can I give you a hug?”

“Give me a hug?” Chirrut asked incredulously. But he did open his arms.

Bodhi scooted over and then Chirrut found a slight but comfortingly warm body wrapped around him and his hands settling on silky hair and a bony back.

“He is going to be in much better condition soon. They'll take him out of there. You'll get to talk.” Bodhi's quiet, raspy voice in his ear and long and elegant hand rubbing his shoulder were reassuring. Centering.

“Thank you,” he sighed into Bodhi's shoulder.

 

After Baze was lifted out of his tank, Chirrut continued his solemn, patient vigil by his bedside. He kept it up for a good five minutes after the last med-droid had left.

“Baze?” He whispered.

No reaction. Of course not. He was still anaesthesized. But not behind an impenetrable barrier anymore.

Chirrut found the edge of the bed with his hands and then the pillow, felt it and the mattress dipping toward Baze's weight. Strands of familiar coarse hair lay on the pillow, but not nearly as many as he would have expected. He couldn't help following them to his head, where he discovered that half his mane had fallen victim to either enemy flames or later med-droid razors. The contrast between thick hair and naked, scar covered scalp was stark.

But one of Baze's big ears was now uncovered, making Chirrut smile as he traced its shell. He had always found them unbelievably endearing. From the earlobe it wasn't far to the jaw muscles, which were uncharacteristically relaxed, probably due to the stasis state. Then he cupped his jaw, what was left of the beard tickling him and the curve of soft lips soothing him. His hands were covering Baze's entire face from jaw to hairline before he knew it.

Chirrut knew now what Bodhi had meant by “serene but worried”. The expression still hadn't left Baze. Aside from that he found the burns he had been told would be there and, unexpectedly, wrinkles he didn't know yet. (Oh, _Force_ , he hadn't studied Baze like this in too long.) The breathtaking beauty, on the other hand, came as no surprise whatsoever.

Chirrut was so overwhelmed with conflicting feelings, unsure whether he wanted to let them wash over him and pass and replace them with the calm and certainty of meditation, unsure whether he would even be able to, that he almost didn't notice the twitch in Baze's eyelids, the tickle of eyelashes against his palms.

He jerked away with a start. He did have the excuse of wanting to check the extent of his friend's injuries, and could probably have got away with inspecting a lot more of him, but he still didn't want him waking up while he was groping his face.

Before it could move very far a heavy weight fell on Chirrut's left hand and pressed it down again. Baze was holding on to him with his strong fingers again, the way he had when he thought he was dying. But this time he let him feel his cheek too, and the muscles straining to get used to being under a conscious mind's control again within it.

And then, lips moved against Chirrut's palm. They pressed into it in what he could have sworn felt like a weak little kiss, and then another. Heavy breaths after that. Chirrut's heart leapt and soared. Baze was looking at him now. Blinking slowly. And _smiling_.

“Chirrut...” A low rumble that he felt under his touch as much as he heard it.

Chirrut found it hard to speak. “The Force is merciful,” he choked out. It was true; they were both alive, the plans for the planet-destroying weapon were in the rebel's hands, he got to feel the vibrations of Baze's deep voice again.

Baze shook his head very slightly. His smile grew even wider. There was a chuckle on his breath. Chirrut felt this was the time to act, if such a time should ever come.

“You call me reckless all the time,” he said.

“Because you are,” Baze retorted.

“And yet you forgive me time and again.”

Baze sighed. Chirrut felt the eyeroll under the lid his little finger lay on, but the smile didn't diminish. “What choice do I have.”

“So when I do something rash now it is because I trust I'll be forgiven, if forgiviness is necessary.”

“Just do it. As if I could ever stop you.”

Chirrut leaned forward the rest of the way – he noticed he had hovered quite closely above Baze already, at a distance where his breaths were easy to hear and the bacta and antiseptics on his skin easy to smell – found his lips, and kissed him.

Chirrut had spent his whole life giving thanks, but he had never been as grateful to the Force – or to Baze – as when he finally kissed back.


End file.
